costard Posted April 8, 2014 Share Posted April 8, 2014 Someone find me an ambulance, this one's going to hurt. I'm still not going to say it, damn you! 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Michael Emrys Posted April 8, 2014 Share Posted April 8, 2014 Should be "centre of visible mass" that they're aiming for... Feel free to insert that in my text then, although I would have thought that it would have been understood. The point still stands. Michael 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kipanderson Posted April 8, 2014 Share Posted April 8, 2014 Hi, Apologies for butting in, this has probably been said before, but quick comment on the effect of slope, compound angles, on German APCBC ammo. Long and the short of it is that APCBC ammo it’s extremely vulnerable to the adverse effects of slope. Quick rough example. 80mm armour struck at 45 degrees by 75mm APCBC ammo offers a protection in equivalent millimetres of vertical plate of around 120mm. When struck by the same round at 55 degrees... the protection offered in equivalent millimetres of vertical plate is just over 200mm . MarkIV and StugIII gun have penetration of 123mm against vertical plate at 500m. The figure for the Panther’s gun is 168mm. Now look at the shape of IS tanks, their amour thickness. Armour is often 80mm, 100mm or 120mm and often the compound strike angle will be 45 degrees or over. We are lucky to have CM... think of the alternatives.. .. All the best, Kip. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bastables Posted April 8, 2014 Share Posted April 8, 2014 That's all true, but consider how that works out in practice. When the whole tank is exposed, the gunner aims for the center of mass, which would be somewhere in the upper part of the upper hull most likely. Given a random distribution of hits around the aim point, a percentage of those hits are likely to strike the turret or mantlet. Now take the case where only the turret is visible. The gunner, still aiming at the center of mass, aims at the center of the mantlet. Since it is a smaller target, on average he gets fewer hits overall, but it get worse. Now instead of rounds hitting above the aim point and striking the turret, they may miss the tank entirely or merely glance off the roof. Seems to me that going hull down is almost always a winner, even if the turret armor is somewhat less substantial. Apparently tankers agreed with me, as that is what they tried to do when circumstances allowed it. Michael It of course assumes that a aim point has a random distribution (or round dispersion) larger than a turret. I'm more of the opinion that presenting a smaller target is mostly about not being a visible tgt and therefore not being a aim point in the first place. Tanks like men when shot at when they're hull down or prone either are hit or have enough time to back away into dead ground. Which is why the weird CMx2 bug where hull down tanks seem to have worse spotting was so off putting as the game was essentially saying a fully exposed tank can see a hull down tanks faster than vice versa even if the fully exposed tank was moving into the hull down's view. The wound ballistics study in bougainville which shows a tendency for upper body strikes which is logical, as that tended to be the part of the body that was exposed when your prone and even in the close initial contacts in the jungle what one naturally aims at as one brings the weapon to the shoulder. copy behind paywall unfortunately: http://www.scribd.com/doc/44779697/Wound-Ballistics 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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